2023 was not a great year for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After a dozen years of pop culture dominance, the most successful franchise in pop culture history stumbled with critical bombs on the big screen (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) and the small screen (Secret Invasion), and the first certified MCU box office bomb (The Marvels). I haven’t even mentioned the whole Jonathan Majors debacle! But let’s back up to that bomb. The Marvels — now available to stream on Disney+ — is exactly what the MCU should be doing right now. In fact, The Marvels is emblematic of everything that’s right with the MCU and should absolutely be the blueprint for the MCU moving forward.
Here’s what The Marvels does extremely well: it takes three characters (Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and Monica Rambeau) from three MCU properties (the Captain Marvel film and the Ms. Marvel and WandaVision TV shows) and it brings them together — plausibly! — for a fun, frenetic, and fast (by MCU standards) adventure. That’s it. The Marvels succeeds because it doesn’t take on more plot than it can handle, and it lets us catch up with Carol, Monica, and Kamala.
Not only that, it gives us moments that die-hard MCU fans have been waiting for. It succinctly catches casual fans up on the plot threads and then it actually ties them up! The movie travels the same quirky yet sincere trajectory initially charted by one-time franchise outliers Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The Marvels is just a fun ol’ time with some darn good heroes, y’know?
So why did The Marvels bomb? Well, you can partially blame the SAG strike that essentially halted all press for the film. You can also look at the underperformance of all franchise films in 2023, from Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones to Transformers and superhero movies like The Flash and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. On top of all that, The Marvels is also a victim of the Catch-22 that plagues the MCU right now: the MCU is too overloaded with continuity, but continuity is actually what makes the MCU fun.
The fun of the first decade of the MCU was all of the continuity — the crossing over. It was fun seeing how Black Widow evolved from Avengers to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Dropping Iron Man in the first new Spider-Man film felt special. WandaVision only worked because we saw Wanda and Vision slowly develop a romance in the background of multiple movies. The problem is that so many Marvel movies over the past few years have started stuff that Marvel Studios can’t finish or don’t even seem interested in continuing. To prove my point, here’s a probably incomplete rundown of every dangling MCU plot thread and, for fun, the number of days (as of publishing) that Kevin Feige has let these threads flap in the wind:
This list doesn’t take into account the number of brand new, supposedly A-list characters that have been introduced into the MCU over the past three years — characters that we’ve only seen once! Where are Shang-Chi, Sersi, Riri Williams, Moon Knight, and She-Hulk? And why is it taking so long to catch up with Agatha Harkness, U.S. Agent, Kate Bishop, Daredevil, and Yelena Belova? No one has even mentioned that there’s a new Captain America since 2021! That is wild, and it’s emblematic of this larger problem: the MCU feels like reading a stack of #1 issues and the grocery store never has issue #2. Yes, kids, we used to buy comics at the grocery store.
However, just like in the good old days of the MCU, The Marvels is issue #2! This movie uses continuity for good — to advance three superheroes’ personal story arcs. And following the classic Marvel Comics ethos which declares that every issue is some reader’s first issue, The Marvels tells a story that rewards the completists while still letting the lapsed, fair weather, or casual viewers in on the fun — because this movie is fun. This is the blueprint, Kevin!
Give us a Hercules and She-Hulk team-up special on Disney+. Drop that new, critter-filled Guardians of the Galaxy lineup in some animated shorts. Put Shang-Chi, Moon Knight, Daredevil, and Echo in a Marvel Knights feature film ASAP. At the very least, maybe have anyone acknowledge that… y’know… a hidden underwater nation came to the surface. And speaking of The Marvels‘ own dangling plot threads (which I pardon because it’s only been 89 days), dear lord, do not make us wait another 5 years to see Kamala Khan’s Young Avengers. They are young Avengers. The clock is ticking!
Just forget massive CGI war scenes, forget meandering plots with opaque motives, and forget building up Kang to be a super threat for another superhero’s movie (also, Marvel, just forget Kang). The Marvels had a blast with just three characters that the larger MCU demanded we see together. And with the MCU tangled up in so many loose threads, it’s a relief to watch a Marvel movie do what comics do and continue the damn story.